If you’re a parent of young teens, you’re probably aware of how quickly your role can change from that of nurturing provider to, basically, full-time chauffeur. I’m thinking of buying one of those little hats and taking up smoking, so I have something to do while I wait.

Invariably you wind up with time to kill in various unfamiliar places, or at least I do -- say, during the warm-up before my son’s away baseball games (I’ll happily watch the games, but I think it goes beyond the call of parental duty to sit and watch them stretch for an hour), or at one of my daughter’s play rehearsals that are just out-of-the-way enough to make going home vaguely pointless.

So here’s what I’ve decided to do during that time: Exercise. Ha ha! No, I tried that once and I almost tripped over this:

What I’ve actually been doing when I have an hour to kill in one of these places is ask Siri (the little woman inside my iPhone upon whom I have developed a platonic crush) for the nearest independent record and/or bookstore. And then I go spend money there, because I haven’t already spent enough money on my kids’ activities and all the gas.

Sadly, there isn’t always one left in the general vicinity -- and more than once my phone has sent me to one that turned out to be shuttered when I got there, and I’m left standing grimly in front of the empty window like a character in a Bruce Springsteen song. But sometimes I strike paydirt, like this past weekend, when I was able to patronize both the Record Exchange in Salem (an old favorite) and Annie’s Book Swap in beautiful downtown (?) Northborough, Mass.

Granted, I didn’t NEED any of the stuff I bought (pictured above), and maybe even could have found some of it cheaper on eBay. But a sign at Annie’s captured the reason why I think it’s worthwhile to drop some dough in these places: It said, basically, “If you see something you like, buy it here -- so we can stay here!”

As someone who grew up in the retail world -- my dad and grandfather owned small men’s clothing stores that survived until the mid-’90s, when the big boxes and their $12.99 jeans finally put them under -- I know that storefronts aren’t cheap, and running them isn’t easy. That’s why little, independent establishments are disappearing faster than bees and polar icecaps.

But they add something to our increasingly homogeneous communities -- character, personality, service, a place to gather that you can touch and smell, unlike a website. And we’ll miss them when they’re gone, because we need them.

At least those of us with an hour to kill in Northborough certainly do. Otherwise we may have to exercise.